Year-end Report - 2008
El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
IMPORTANT NOTE! In the course of the year, I’ve been transferring contact information from my old hardcopy address book to my computer address book. Much of the information, I’ve discovered, is quite old. If your address, phone numbers, etc., have changed in recent years, and I might not have been notified, please send me your most current information.
Year-End Letter December 2008
Dear Friend,
This has been one heck of an interesting year for me, with lots to look back on, think about, and be grateful for (oddly enough). Both at the personal level and in the broader perspective, it has been a year filled with change and development.
2008 was the year that David and I more or less felt that we were settled into our living arrangements at El Castillo Retirement Residences – except for a few small purchases to complete our apartments, the renovation was completed, the new furniture acquired, art hung on the walls, folk crafts placed in their niches and on their shelves, new audio/visual equipment installed and functioning. It was time to begin enjoy living here, and indeed we did and continue to.
Living in a retirement facility worked out very well for us. First off, we like our apartments – the look, the comfort, the functionality, the smaller scale and thus greater simplicity in our lives. While I have occasionally done a bit of cooking – and hope to expand on that score (perhaps a pipedream) – taking meals in the dining room has been, overall, a highly satisfying experience. Particularly attractive for David and me is having a pleasant outdoors terrace adjacent to the dining room. It means that for much of the year we can eat lunch or more usually, dinner, outside, and even breakfast in the warmer months (when we do take it). It is an absolutely delightful experience and friends we have invited to join us for a meal generally find that eating outside feels very “non-institutional” and much more like being at a pleasant restaurant.
The kitchen manager is friendly, open to ideas, and willing to listen to suggestions. Currently I am working on a small effort to obtain some fresh produce from our wonderful Santa Fe Farmer’s Market – to get some of our fruits and vegetables from small local growers. How much more sensible to have flavorful locally grown pears rather than having them shipped from China via a giant food purveyor. The Farmer’s Market is closely tied in with the Farm to Table movement, active here as it is in many cities, and having some small percentage of our food be locally sourced would be a win-win for all.
To keep my hand in gardening I embarked on a new project in the resident garden area this past season – a wide strip of overgrown land between one of the apartment buildings and the dining room that has looked like an eyesore. I undertook a backbreaking effort to dig up a 20 x 15 foot patch, remove enough rocks and stones to build half the Great Wall of China, and put in an arrangement of drought and shade tolerant perennials (and later a healthy planting of spring-blooming bulbs), all nicely mulched. The idea was that if it turns out successful, I will continue digging up patches of equal area, one at a time, moving gradually towards the dining room, and turning an eyesore into a place of beauty. The first patch, mulched and bordered is lovely and I am inspired to open up the next section, despite the hard work, next spring.
Going away on trips (of which we did many in 2008 – more further on) is SO much easier than when we owned a house – a neighbor takes in mail, another neighbor waters plants (including a rather extensive number of flower pots on our part of the catwalk) and that is pretty much it. We don’t worry and wonder what might await us as we did when we lived out in the country.
The downtown location has offered all the rewards we hoped for. Santa Fe, with its brilliant sun, intense blue skies, surrounding mountains, and adobe (and more commonly, faux adobe) construction, is gorgeous. This is true especially in the central core, which is the oldest part, of course, and the constant realization that our location is the most perfect one imaginable causes us to pinch ourselves almost every day and ask what we did to deserve this? Once our lives calmed down with the completion of our apartment renovations and furnishing, we were able to begin a series of walks to explore various neighborhoods surrounding us. As much as we thought we knew Santa Fe before, we discovered endless small streets, lanes, and alleys with the quintessential Santa Fe look and feel – the look and feel that inspired us to move out here in the first place. It is said many times that the only real way to discover a town or city is to walk it, and it has been so true for us. Repeated walks through the same streets always lead to new discoveries. I located an out-of-print architectural guide to the city and so some of our walks are very focused and have allowed us to see with fresh eyes, and more or less rediscover, buildings we had looked at many times before. We now have a whole list of favorite strolls.
We walk to galleries for Friday evening and Saturday afternoon openings, to our major Performing Arts Center, to almost all the museums, to shops and movie theatres and a wide variety of cultural events. It keeps us in shape and out of the car. In fact, after almost a year of cautiousness, last January we sold our second (and newer but smaller) car.
As the weather warmed up, I returned to bicycling, and there is almost nowhere in Santa Fe I cannot reach by bicycle. I don’t bike at night and in bad or really cold weather and I can’t run errands if it involves items too big to get on the bike, but about 90% of my non-walking trips are by bike, weather permitting. Our car use within Santa Fe has dropped enormously and fits within our goal to reduce the total miles we travel by car. David, who does not bike, uses our municipal bus system, which is reasonably decent (and very cheap for seniors), for some of his trips.
In sum, living at El Castillo has worked out far better than we had imagined in even our most optimistic moments.
In the course of the year, my involvement in volunteer activities has grown much more extensive. I began the year with some volunteer work at the Museum of International Folk Art involving online access to digital photographs through standardized cataloging. The project got suspended up waiting for the signing of a contract with the University of New Mexico. In addition, I was heavily involved in a series of one-time (though annually reoccurring) events – work parties cleaning up the Santa Fe River (a tiny creek these days that happens to flow through downtown, including right in front of El Castillo), trail maintenance on the Dale Ball Trail (a wonderful network of trails weaving through the hills above Santa Fe), Block Captain for the incomparable, one of its kind (in the U.S.) International Folk Art Market, and a variety of tasks related to the Santa Fe Film Festival. During the summer I became a volunteer trail guide leading Sunday morning nature walks on the Waterfalls Trail at Hyde State Park, part-way up the ski basin road, and managed to get there each time by biking up.
One “problem” this year relating to volunteer activities was that from January through early October, David and I traveled an extraordinary amount (more on that later in this report) and we just weren’t here much – it did not make much sense to throw myself into on-going activities. With the arrival of fall, my focus has been on a more continuing approach, with one or two activities that are not only worthwhile, but interesting and teach me some new skills. I did a lot of exploratory work over the summer to identify the organizations I was interested in, and now things are beginning to come together.
The Santa Fe Film Festival asked me to be an assistant to the Box Office Coordinator based on how I handled myself at the box office last year. I was also asked to serve as Buildings & Grounds Committee Chair at El Castillo beginning in 2009 and I accepted.
The most promising direction is to do on-going conservation easement monitoring for the Santa Fe Conservation Trust. This involves inspecting properties whose owners have donated a conservation easement to the Trust (for significant property and estate tax breaks) to make sure they continue to adhere to the requirements for such trust donations. I’ve already gone out on several monitoring trips with a guy who is experienced, and the properties we have visited are spectacular, and not surprisingly, owned by some very wealthy people, often of national reputation.
I also volunteered to be a Presiding Judge at one of the Santa Fe precinct polling stations. Given the turn-out for this election and all the possibilities of things going wrong, having the top-level job at a polling station was a potentially nightmarish responsibility involving a lot of training in the complexities of in lieu of absentee ballots, spoiled ballots, campaign workers and the media, new voting equipment, and an almost endless number of messy scenarios. But when Election Day had come and gone, I found it had been a thrilling experience and I was tremendously glad I had taken it on. In fact, I was very moved and inspired by what the county clerk at our training for the position said. She told the audience of volunteer Presiding Judges that it is one thing to have bumper stickers and yellow ribbons on one’s cars, but the real patriots were those, like us, who volunteered to oversee one of the most fundamental aspects of a democracy.
I worked extensively for the Obama campaign in the month leading up to the election. This was one campaign where I wanted to jump in as never before, to be part of something so many of us viewed as history-making, and the excitement around town was palpable (as well as being really well organized). This being Santa Fe, there were almost no McCain signs out but every neighborhood had hundreds of Obama signs and banners and bumper stickers.
Speaking of Santa Fe, although the city is plagued with many of the urban sprawl issues endemic to most healthy U.S. cities (that is, cities that are adding population), this has been a year of some very positive and exciting developments, most within walking distance of us. The new Convention Center opened downtown, and though, architecturally it conforms to the big building version of Santa Fe Style, it is well done, functional, with many amenities – not just for visitors but for locals (for example, a community art and performance area, 2nd story veranda with magnificent mountain views, a pleasant courtyard). Fairly soon the new New Mexico History Museum will open behind the Palace of the Governors downtown, with a terrific collection from a major donor of New Mexican traditional art (santos, bultos, retablos).
The most exciting development has been the opening of the Railyard, literally an abandoned set of rail yards near downtown (and within walking distance of El Castillo), which after decades of desultory effort, finally moved ahead this year and has become the most striking urban space in the downtown core. It includes a magnificent new park, Site Santa Fe (a Kunsthalle of globally cutting edge art installations), Warehouse 21 (a teen hang-out), a permanent home for the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market, a movie multiplex, restaurants, wine bars, and a big new REI. Architecturally and in terms of lay-out it is contemporary and handsome and a complete break from the increasingly clichéd “Santa Fe style.” For those of us who live here, this is truly the kind of change we want. Many of the best art galleries in Santa Fe have built new homes on the edge of the Railyard, so it has become “the” art district to be and be seen.
Beginning this month, we will have commuter rail service to Albuquerque and beyond, with the Rail Runner. The last stop in Santa Fe is at the Railyard, which we can walk to, and which will allow us to take the train to Albuquerque, and we hope, before too long, will offer frequent service to the Albuquerque Airport.
As to David’s doings, they are following a rather different course from mine, but very interesting nevertheless. After setting up at El Castillo, he began a personal journal of observation about his and life in general – perhaps something along the line of Samuel Pepys’ diary back in the 1600’s. I can’t say that much about it because I haven’t seen it – he’s very private on this score. He’s written up several trip reports, but perhaps most exciting is that a musical piece he composed was performed in early November by the Sangre de Cristo Chorale, the choral group he sings with. The chorale did a program of New Mexico composers, and one of his pieces made it through the rigorous selection process. Back in March he put together another wonderful program of classic American song at our major local nightclub, and will be doing another such program at the same nightclub, Vanessi’s, on March 8, 2009.
As usual, I’ve done far less reading of books than I had hoped to do. Between keeping up with magazines and newspapers, and getting involved in countless activities, even retired life affords little free time to settle in and do serious reading. However, a wonderful book I added to my collection this year, which you might want to take a look at is Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. In a sense it is a reference book, but a very literary one. Some 45 American writers, each rooted in a particular place and landscape, write short pieces about a wide variety of geologically-oriented words, most having regional connotations. It is an intoxicating celebration of what America is, what is special about it, and it brings out in me a kind of patriotism – not the kind that has been so abused of late, but a gentler way of feeling what it is to be an American. Do take a look at it.
Most of my reading was on our longer travels. A few to mention were 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant and Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson. 109 East Palace is a portrayal of the personalities and living arrangements of the (mainly) scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project up on “The Hill” (Los Alamos). While it is a fascinating look into not only Los Alamos, but Santa Fe in the 1940’s, it has extra meaning for us because a number of the people discussed are still alive and living at El Castillo – a bit of living history from a now seemingly very distant era. Reading the book tied in beautifully with attending a performance of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Dr. Atomic by John Adams, through the wonders of the Met’s High Definition Simulcast productions, which we are now attending for the second year. The opera is an exciting and complex look at some of the key players in the Manhattan Project. Both the book and the opera had particular resonance for me as a retiree of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War is, to many, Edmund Wilson’s finest book, a study of the writings of the great and the forgotten on what the war meant to them at the time, given that the Civil War was really the greatest convulsion in American life. As Edmund Wilson himself wrote, Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861-65 in which so many people were so articulate? And indeed, one marvels at how exquisitely ordinary people expressed themselves in private letters and other writings which were never intended to be seen by more than one or a few others. It is reminiscent of another book about another war I read the previous year, The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell, which explores a similar experience, only this time it is World War I and the writings of the English who participated in and underwent the horrors of that bloody war.
The magazines we read that are the most consistently well written and stimulating on a broad range of issues are The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. However, if I were to call attention to a “Magazine of the Year” to recommend it is Conservation, published by the Society for Conservation Biology. It is consistently provocative (in a quiet sort of way) and challenging. This is because it offers non-ideological articles and discussions that are often counterintuitive to what we may think about the state of the natural world and our impact on it, but it is all based on research results. The magazine is for the informed layman and in no way panders, but it does expand our view of the complexity of dealing with human influence on the world around us.
Top films seen this year at the Santa Fe Film Festival, should you get a chance to see them: Breaking the Maya Code, and Waltz with Bashir. The former is the most fascinating film on an ancient culture I have ever seen, focusing on the story of how the writing system, the calendar, and the numbering system, were rediscovered. The latter is an Israeli animated film on a serious topic, the 1983 Lebanese War, that takes animation to a new level of seriousness of deep communication.
This has been a year when our awareness of growing older, with all its difficult aspects, has become far more front and center than ever before – that we lose friends, and friends lose people they care about, that friends get sick with serious illnesses and diseases, that there is loss and pain, that one tries to be available to and caring of friends and family. It all starts to become a far larger aspect of one’s life than I ever had appreciated, much less anticipated, when I was younger. In fact, one very noticeable aspect of getting older is how much more of our thoughts, time, and efforts involve, in one way or another, those we care about who are going through health crises or dealing with health conditions that seriously impact their quality of life. This awareness is heightened by the death of people we did not know but who were part of our lives since our youth. A few such names that stand out for me are Paul Newman, Studs Terkel, Miriam Makeba, and Odetta.
Here are a few observations on life and growing older from my own perspective. First is health. I feel incredibly fortunate that at this time, I am in great condition, though there is always the awareness that one’s sense of good health can be here one moment, and then in a flash, change irretrievably and never be the same. We see it all around us, not just here at El Castillo but with many friends and acquaintances, and so to a large extent, I think my own state of health is in good measure just plain luck.
Having good health, I’ve become far more determined, as I age, to stack the odds in my favor. Both David and I have become far, far more conscious of what we eat – both quality and quantity, and by keeping a close check, we have both managed to get our weight down to close to what we want it. I am back within the range of my “historic” weight, from which I had crept up in the last 10-15 years. Especially after our trip to Africa, where we ate plentifully and exercised little, our weights shot up to record-breaking levels. I spent the entire summer getting it back under control and the results are personally very satisfying. But we have to pay attention, every single day, to what and how we eat. The kind of junk food that would once appeal to me as an occasional escape no longer tempts me much.
Combined with better and more measured eating has been exercising and remaining active. As I age I try to be increasingly aware of the state of my body. Another advantage of moving downtown from out in the country, ironically, is that I am much more physically active. We walk whenever possible, and this includes not just the immediate area but well beyond that. If walking is not practical, I bike whenever feasible. This includes, in warmer weather, two different long and strenuous rides beyond Santa Fe, one up the ski basin road into the Santa Fe National Forest, the other way out the Old Santa Fe Trail to where it is no longer paved. We have a fitness room, and throughout the year I work out four mornings a week. While I know that my health could change unexpectedly at any time, meantime, I take a tremendous pleasure in my sense of well-being. This is not some kind of sinful pride or self-centeredness, I think, but rather living in the moment and enjoying each and every moment we are granted. And while I make every effort to not be smug about it, I also know I am in better shape than 90% of those in my age cohort.
In short, eating moderately and eating healthy, along with regular intense exercise is something one must work at every day, that is, be mindful of, even when detouring, as will happen, from the straight and narrow. I did find it difficult to approach things this way in the beginning, but now, while it is not easy, it is easier.
A big part of staying young, mentally and in spirit, it seems to me, is constantly challenging oneself with new experiences and ideas. I try to be aware of major new developments affecting many people – the role of text messaging, the use of Facebook, new technologies, which even if I do not understand why those younger than me have gravitated to them, I am aware they bring big social changes in their wake and I want to be familiar with them.
There were a couple of new personal experiences this year that were part of my mental expansion. One was going on a four-day camping trip to the Valley View Hot Springs on the west slopes of Colorado’s magnificent Sangre de Cristo mountains, the northern continuation of the same range that ends at Santa Fe. What was new and different is that Valley View is a property that is owned by a local land trust and is premised on being clothing optional. It has a variety of natural hot springs in very lovely settings, along with tent-only and RV campgrounds, cabins, co-ed bathrooms/showers, and a cooking shed. We had heard about it and it is located very close to some beautiful Forest Service trailheads into the high country that we wanted to hike.
It was a funky sort of place, around for over 30 years and originally a kind of lefty retreat, and it was a bit of a surprise at first when a perfectly nice gentleman ambled past our campsite buck-naked. But it was a really laid back place and no one pressured anyone else to have their clothes on or off. I quickly got to the point where if I felt like going, upon waking up, for a hot springs soak, I didn’t feel I had to put anything on (except a towel over my shoulder) and it began, very soon, feeling liberating. We did some gorgeous hikes (properly clothed, of course) and everyone was friendly when we got back to camp. What I most enjoyed was the tremendous diversity of guests. I realized how fragmented and segregated our society, overall, has become, and that this was one of the rare experiences when people from a broad spectrum of American life all came together, from truck drivers with tattoos to lawyers and government bureaucrats. So by the time our trip was over, I had really had a small mind-expanding new experience.
I acquired a digital camera this year, taking photos for the first time in about 5 years. The immediate driver was our upcoming “big” trip to Africa and the fact that everyone stared cross-eyed at me at the thought I might go to Africa and not take any pictures of all the wildlife. While I got a point-and-shoot camera, I got one of the best ones on the market, a Canon A650 IS Powershot, which only arrived one week before the trip. I had a lot to learn quickly, though it has so much power and flexibility I still only know how to do a fraction of what it is capable of. But I not only learned the basics and have been able to take some pretty good photos, but I have learned all the associated tasks – working with basic photo management software (in my case, Apple’s iPhoto), downloading, basic editing, e-mailing, creating a 2009 “Scenes of Africa” calendar, and the like. Since coming back from Africa, I’ve been able to take several series of photos of places around Santa Fe that I had come to like very much but had never documented. One of these days I’ll move on to mastering a GPS as one of my new technology learning experiences. A few other “new tricks” for this old dog have been setting up (and using) a Skype Internet telephone account, a Facebook profile and constructing a blog to post travel reports!
This was a travel year par excellence for us – from January to October we were away almost as much as were home. Here is a brief rundown:
· Death Valley – a 9-day camping trip in mid-January – cool, clear weather and little crowding
· Mexico – a month-long trip, from early February to early March, that was tripartite. We spent a week back in Yelapa, the laid-back, semi-remote beach and jungle village only reachable by small water taxi from Puerto Vallarta. Then we continued on to Morelia, capital of the state of Michoacan, with side trips to the beautiful villages of Patzcuaro and Janitzio and the UNESCO World Heritage Monarch butterfly reserve in the mountains of Michoacan to see millions of butterflies, an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Finally, after a brief stay in Guadalajara, a flight to the southern Baja Peninsula, where we explored several towns (La Paz, Todos Santos, and Loreto) and did a 5-day sea-kayaking trip in the Sea of Cortez, camping on a totally wild island. This trip also included a visit to a component of the Magdalena Bay ecosystem on the Pacific Coast to see gray whales during their birthing season. (The sea kayaking trip was run by a small adventure company out of Idaho).
· New England and Washington, DC – this was a 3-week trip from late March to mid-April that I did by myself to visit family and friends as spring was arriving. In New England, only the most preliminary signs of spring were showing and it felt as cold as mid-winter, whereas Washington, DC was at the very peak of its spring magnificence, and looked far better, in fact, than when David and I had lived there.
· Southern and Eastern Africa – this was “the big one,” a (in theory) belated celebration of my 65th birthday in April 2007 (!!!). On the last day of April, we took Amtrak to New York from New Mexico, had some days to enjoy the city, and then took off for Africa. We made a brief stop in New York on the way home and did not get back into our apartment until June 11, David’s birthday. The experience is covered in separate “trip reports” from David and myself that we are furnishing along with this letter, and therefore, won’t go into now.
· Mid-West Road trip – this was another big one, for years in the planning stage. We took off a week before Labor Day and didn’t return home until almost 5 weeks later, at the end of September. Again, I am including two reports on that trip, one by me, and one focused on “art palaces of the Mid-West” (i.e., the great new star-architect museums) by David.
· San Juan Islands – this was the close-out trip of the year, a six-day visit in early October to these beautiful islands in the northern part of Puget Sound. Early October tends to be a sunny time of the year when the crowds have left, and indeed, we had numerous magnificent mountain and sea experiences.
Along with all these trips, this was a very active year of hiking and camping. I did a lot more day hikes than I had in past years, some with the Sierra Club, some with David, a few by myself. Amongst other accomplishments, I climbed Santa Fe Baldy at 12,600 feet, something I had wanted to do ever since moving to Santa Fe and had put off for one reason or another. I also went snowshoeing a number of times into the mountains above Santa Fe as we had a pretty good snow season. We did two 4-day camping trips, one to the Colorado Sangre de Cristo Range, described above as part of the clothing optional hot springs retreat we stayed at. The other was to the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, a spectacularly unspoiled area that I wish I had headed to years ago. We had the trails to ourselves and the wildflower displays were abundant, varied, and memorable. We also tried a different approach to camping once, brought on by the peaking of gas prices in early summer – departing one afternoon to camp relatively close to home, make a camp dinner, breakfast the next morning, do a hike, and then go home. Keep it simple, no long drives, and not disrupt our normally busy schedule – that was the new philosophy. It was a real success and we will probably do more of these “quickie” explorations of nearby areas in the coming year. Of course, a big reason these trips have worked out so well is that we go on them during the week when the outdoors is relatively quiet.
With the economic downturn, we have no big trips on the drawing boards, but are doing some preliminary planning – really just sketching out ideas – for an extended trip to New Zealand in the February – March 2010 time frame. I am going East in January to be at the Inauguration (I can’t miss this historic event) and David and I have fairly firm plans to finally, after many years of discussion, go to Ontario for the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, as well as seeing what has been happening in Toronto. The Shaw and Stratford Festivals are reputed to have some of the best dramatic productions anywhere on the continent.
Lots of folks have made trips to China, but it has never been on my “must do” list for a number of reasons. However, a nagging part of me says that as an up and coming great power, China is one of those places you have to see to understand where the world is heading in the 21st century. This is especially true of cities like Shanghai and Beijing, which are growing at fantastic rates and undertaking truly gargantuan urban projects. (Dubai and the other Emirate States are perhaps another such area). This was brought home to me quite emphatically by a splendid exhibit of photographs by Stephen Wilkes (who is best known for a magnificent series of color photographs of the decaying buildings on Ellis Island – the portion of the island never seen by visitors). Wilkes captures perfectly the sense of China as a country that, despite its lack of political freedom and extremes of pollution, is taking on visionary projects on an extravagant scale and quickly turning them into reality.
The state of the world is always of concern and each recent year, including this one, seems to bring so many troubling developments. Normally I share my thoughts on this topic in this, my year-end letter, but this year almost everything seemed to tie in with the presidential campaign and election. Because that was such a dominating event, I have instead put my thoughts in a separate document, which I am sending with this letter. I will end here with the hope, as always, that next year finds you well, happy, and with some hope for the future. With the outcome of the election, I’d like to think that in one dimension at least, we are on a better track.
Love,
Ken